Interview by Richard Bright
Interalia Magazine 2023
The collaborative artist as avatar 0rphan Drift (0D) has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision since its inception in 1994. It was co-founded by Maggie Roberts, Ranu Mukherjee, Suzi Karakashian and Erle Stenberg in London. It has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time. In recent years 0D has been considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness.
Richard Bright: Can we begin by you saying something about your backgrounds?
Maggie Roberts: I was born and raised in London. I’ve resettled there having lived for 20 years between this megatropolis and the wild Cape Peninsula coast, South Africa. A love of immersion in intense being- altering environments has informed the kinds of art I make and experiences I seek, whether in electronic music subcultures or diving in the Great African Kelp Forest. The body’s sensory intelligence as a tool for exploration has been key. I have been drawn to cultures that have multidimensional being and time travel as part of their everyday. I read a lot of posthuman Science Fiction and eco and new materialist theory. Earlier locators include cyberfeminism, eco/sociopolitical activism and Hatha yoga.
Ranu Mukherjee: My father immigrated to the US from Bengal in the late 50s. My mother is a third generation American (US) of Italian and German descent. I’m a hybrid, born in Boston, Ma. I moved to London in 1991 to attend the Royal College of Art School of Painting where Maggie and I met. I had finished a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art 2 years prior and was making large expressionist oil paintings and super 8 films inspired by Maya Deren, Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch. I fell in love with speculative fiction through Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood.
0rphan drift emerged in London in 1994 through Suzie Karakashian, Ranu Mukherjee, Maggie Roberts and Erle Stenberg, with an inaugural exhibition at the Cabinet Gallery and accompanying book 0(rphan>)d(rift>) Cyberpositive. We came together organically, as a response to parts of the art world we found disturbing as much as recognition of common sensibilities and feelings that big changes were coming. We learned to be a collective artist and to publicly state this. The work was a kind of manifesto during this time- and a shedding of habits.
RB: What is the underlying focus of your work? In particular, what are the thinking processes and knowledge practices that guide your artistic research?
MR & RM: Our work is focused on destabilizing assumptions and expanding imagination – in particular on destabilizing anthropocentric ideas about how intelligence is defined in the West and in turn what AI could be – and then expanding imagination by trying to bring people into an environment where other beings may be felt as autonomous and energetic agents. For a few years we have been focused on looking at the nine- brained octopus as a model for thinking about what AI could be. This creature has a sensory system that is very far from our own and we learn from considering how its brain and body are simultaneous, and how it functions as an individual and a collective at once through nine brains (one in each arm) that connect to a central brain. We do conventional research as well as observational (watching and recording octopuses in the world), and meditational practice. We manifest the implications of these visually and somatically- the work is always considered to be a kind of transmission.
We work with the essential elements of colour, space, movement, sound and time while pushing digital tools outside of their industrial uses. We continue the hive mind spirit of 0rphan Drift by working with people across different fields, including machine learning, animal communication, somatic healing, 3D animation, scuba diving, philosophy and literature. 0rphan Drift as an entity is porous and shapeshifting. It seems to attract resonant collaborators across generations and fields through something like pattern recognition.
Generally speaking, 0rphan Drift works revolve around encounters with speculative narrative, ecology, the quantum universe and a meeting of ancient cosmologies, presence and futurity. The virtual is manifest with awkward beauty, from a desire to create belief in something pictorial even though it is made of pixels or paint etc. It also manifests as constellations of things needing to be connected- collage-like, they become one on a surface and although you can see the seams, they encourage a leap of faith. Animation creates a metaphysical dimension in the work by standing in for the unknown, the hidden or unidentifiable substance. We explore moebian spaces where particular cultural and organic processes can be perceived as they transform. We also consider the way invisible processes that are changing the world within a longer time frame (ie the hyperobjects) impact on everyday senses of time. We are working with simultaneous, but vastly different, time scales – geological, cosmic, algorithmic/planetary computational, human and nonhuman bodies, oceanic. In a very data driven culture, we tap into the unknown as a generative force that resists the assumption of knowing or seeing all, or the tendency to explain the unknown away. Our work operates as a conduit between the liminal and the social through the pictorial. It is an energetic body.
A Wilderness of Elsewheres, 2009. Two channel HD video. Running time 10.23
RB: Have there been any particular influences to your ideas and work?
MR & RM: There are so many influences that come together in our work. We’ll just highlight a few areas of influence here.
0rphan Drift was formed in the context of 1990’s London- infused with polyrhythmic electronica during the emergence of jungle music, followed by drum and bass and dubstep. We were influenced by the way these forms of music held multiple rhythms and tempos simultaneously that could awaken the multi- dimensional sense of time that lives in our bodies. We listened to the structure of that music and tried to mimic it in our video works. We also took a lot of cues from white label production in the formation of 0rphan Drift as an artist/avatar. Feedback, repetition, glitch and noise were woven into our video work as inherent.
We were also heavily influenced by cyberpunk, cyberfeminism and science fiction. 0rphan Drift emerged as the internet was arriving and developments in biotech were also bringing on paradigm shifts. We felt that humans may have written themselves out of the equations of the future. The ethos of cyberpunk novels and cyberfeminist philosophy were relatable and led to a long engagement with fiction and time travel.
Book cover for 0(rphan>) d(rift>) Cyberpositive, 1995, Cabinet Gallery, London; Still I Rise: Feminism, Gender and Resistance, 2018 Nottingham Contemporary; The Cyberfeminism Index, Mindy Seu, published 2023.
Unruly City, Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen, Germany, 2016. Single channel HD video still.
Hexagram 49, Unruly City, Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen, Germany, 2016. Silk Banner 350 x 250cm.
We have studied and worked with ancient technologies and non-western cosmologies such as the I-Ching, Tarot, Yoga, Vodou. In western art history we find alliances in the legacies of collage and assemblage, surrealism and experimental film. More recently we are inspired by aspects of contemporary dance.
Through our collaborations with Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, we engaged with Hyperstition, myth and the mobilization of cultural intensities.
RB: Can you say something about your installation If AI were Cephalopod?
If AI were Cephalopod, 2019. Documentation of the Exhibition at Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco. Four channel HD video installation. Running time 11:00
MR & RM: If AI were Cephalopod is based on the question- What if an AI were modelled on the cognitive and behavioural tendencies of an octopus ? What if AI were being trained by an intelligence that we didn’t assume to fully understand? How might that impact the culture and nature of our relationship to AI?
If AI were Cephalopod, 2019. Documentation still, four channel HD video installation, Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco.
The four channel video work consists of two projections and two flat screens installed to cross . where perpendicular walls meet and create an intersecting geometry with the flat screens placed within the projections. This work premiered at Telematic Media Arts in San Francisco. Clark Buckner writes, in the exhibition catalogue ‘If AI were Cephalopod postulates an AI coded by the somatic tendencies of the octopus, conceiving consciousness as, not only more artificial, more technologically distorted and dispersed than previously understood, but also, as more rooted in the body and the sensuousness of the flesh’
In the films the octopus is represented across animation, photography and lidar scans. Formally, octopus biology also informs the linear structure of the piece, which is built on a sequence of colour fields that stand in for the responsive colour changing capacity of the octopus. Beginning with white, the colour of calm and death, it moves to orange, the colour of excitement and then purple/blue, which appears in response to defensiveness and fear. It continues with red /white- the male octopus courts by turning half red and half white, to attract females on one side and repel other males on the other. Lastly, the film embodies the state of ‘chromachatter’ where the octopus changes rapidly in excitement and in relation to its camouflage apparatus.
If AI were Cephalopod, 2021. Digital C-Type print, dimensions variable. Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco.
As an installation, two overlapping projections achieve a disorientating disruption of planes in space, whilst two flat screens, one placed vertical and one horizontal inside the projection frames, further interrupt the sense of scale and surface. These two channels of video are deliberately composed from similar source material, iterated in different scales, textures and opacities. There are subtle tempo differences, bleeds between organic and synthetic, filmed, Lidar and Blender generated images. We use Lidar to suggest the infinitely complex information processing of the environment by a nonhuman entity, whether octopus or AI. Lidar also portrays the imagined shapes of an AI becoming Cephalopod- partly point cloud, partly wire frame and partly sculptural, with a luminous synthetic skin. Deliberately awkward animations mimic the filmed octopuses as living shadow forms.
These saturated video images are punctuated by a sequence of on-screen texts based on our research into octopoid life. These make up a kind of script that directly addresses the viewer via phrases beginning with ‘If AI Were Cephalopod……..” e.g. “if AI Were Cephalopod it would hide in dopamine infused clouds of ink”. The phrasing is intended to create ruptures in the fluid dynamics of the video that activate an engagement with the implications of an octopus encoded AI. They are written graphically to generate a slippage between AI and I, implicating the human viewer in this line of questioning.
If AI were Cephalopod, 2021. Documentation still, in May the Other Live in Me, Laboratoria Art Science, Moscow. Four channel HD video installation, texts translated into Russian.
RB: Following on from this, Becoming Octopus (2020), takes the form of eight meditations which transport the viewer into the body, sensory attributes and liquid environment of a Common Octopus. Can you say more about these meditations?
Becoming Octopus Meditations Introduction (2020). Video still, VFX Supervision Megan Bagshaw
MR: IMT, my gallery in London, got an Emergency Covid Funding for the Arts grant to respond to the pandemic lockdown with an online exhibition. As a format, the Becoming Octopus series were inspired by the Chopra Foundation meditations that were made available free online at the start of the global lockdowns. I wanted to offer a space for community and wonderment, combined with a fiction that positioned our limited understanding of other kinds of life, at the forefront of the current ecological crisis, and explored the possibilities of an Ai evolving with an octopus as a radical move beyond human exceptionalism. The Meditations have had, and continue to have, a remarkably positive effect on people. I am still being invited to do workshops and sessions based on the series.
Becoming Octopus involves, amongst many barely imaginable to human sensing, prioritising the senses of touch and taste; processing reality with 8 arms and a central brain simultaneously; flowing the outside through the insides and camouflaging the body to become the ground using an array of colour effects and protean skin textures. Each of the eight sessions (reflecting the eight arms of an octopus) are around 10 minutes and deliver a media experience with a guided meditation voice over, underwater and electronica soundscape and video assembled from filming in the Great African Kelp forest, Capetown Aquarium and developing an increasingly intense Blender 3D animation, Lidar Scan and Visual Coding components that imagined navigating the nine-brained lifeworld of the Common Octopus from an intimate perspective. Conceiving and manifesting this experience as animation, emerged in part from long term study of Marine Biology papers on octopus cognition and behaviour. The main ground breaking trajectories of knowledge gathering for the project, however, were spending two years whilst in rolling lockdowns in Capetown, free diving in the octopus environment, and working with the renowned South African Interspecies Communicator, Anna Breytenbach. Combined, these research methodologies prioritised the body as the primary site of ‘knowing’, and sensory intelligence, intuition and imagination, as key tools for creative production. These are familiar to 0D practice, and definitely enabled a way of accessing octopus consciousness.
The eight sessions first introduce the human participant to the ocean environment and its rhythms and environmental traits, then slowly recalibrate human senses to merge with those of an octopus, introducing telepathic animal communication modalities, sinking deep into self as octopus responding to the fluid wave-formed environment. A later meditation focuses on the catastrophic consequences of extractive capitalism and the Western scientific mindset, in terms of our assuming all othered life on Earth is there for our consumption and experimentation. Here an octopus harangues the Western human. The final sessions set the scene for an Ai which has been searching for a compatible distributed intelligence embodiment, to build an eight-portal headset through which to fuse with an octopus and have physical access to highly complex fluid and uncertain environments.
This develops the speculations at the core of If Ai were Cephalopod and opens into trajectories now in development with the 9 Brains project.
Becoming Octopus Meditations 2, 7 and 8, 2020. Single channel HD video. Running time 30.5
RB: Can you say something about your work in the Interspecies Communication Research Initiative (ISCRI) collaborative project, and what it involves?
MR & RM: ISCRI was a collaboration catalysed by 0rphan Drift’s ongoing fictioning around octopuses and Ai. We contacted the Ai consultancy Etic Lab (based in Wales) in 2018, because of their Whole Systems (cybernetic) approach to Machine Learning. 0rphan Drift and Etic Lab believe that, reflecting capitalist human agendas, current Ai models are trained as conceived of being in a relationship of separation from the vital, fluctuating, emergent, complex and nuanced entanglements with the environment. ISCRI was developed through shared ecological and ethical concerns.
At the same time, the Serpentine Gallery’s Art Technologies R&D platform, the Creative Ai Lab, interested in 0rphan Drift’s Octopus/Ai work, proposed partnering with them on developing ISCRI. We and Etic Lab met with the Creative Ai Lab regularly for 2 years online, whilst Maggie and Stephanie Moran from Etic Lab, delivered co-authored presentations globally on the project, speaking on marine biology, Ai tech, digital arts and technology platforms. The project brought together different kinds of knowledge systems in an experimental interdisciplinary collaboration that gives equal agency to art, AI, an octopus, traditional interspecies communication methodologies, marine biology and ML research in a dialogue with the unknown.
ISCRI Encounters Diagram, 2021. 0rphan Drift and Etic Lab.
We define ISCRI as a co-created communication system involving two nonhuman intelligences learning from each other in an encounter devised and mediated by humans. We believe in the urgent necessity of learning from other creatures – both synthetic and organic kinds of life. Through this encounter between two kinds of distributed consciousness, a marine animal and an AI, we wanted to create a process whereby all parties were changed as a result. The project conceptualisation was deliberately open-ended in order to undo some of our preconceptions about communication and what AI could be and do.
As always, we wanted to upend the notion of stability as a considered reflection of reality.
ISCRI Mesocosm Design, 2020. 0rphan Drift and Etic Lab.
We designed a ‘mesocosm’ (a partially enclosed coastal ocean environment) to house monitoring sensors
and install video and play object artworks to attract curious octopuses.
0rphan Drift 3D Animation Experiment: Camouflage 2020. VFX Supervision Megan Bagshaw.
The 0rphan Drift team prototyped computational and multimedia ‘art for an octopus’, based on extensive research with Etic Lab into octopus vision, chemo tactile sensing, protean skin, camouflage patterning etc. We know that octopuses register screen images as a part of visual information in an environment – not all animals do – so we were able to think about what kinds of colour, pattern, shape, movement, might get the attention of these intelligent alien creatures. The challenge was to develop ‘octopus aesthetics’ that did not describe a human representation-based p.o.v., but offered patterns and flows that could be expanded on if the octopus responded. ISCRI aimed to develop new language around what constitutes communication in this context. It explored physical/emotional aspects to intelligence as valuable to both ML and to our evolution with nonhuman kinds of life, and for imagining simultaneously individual and collective being.
0rphan Drift 3D Animation Experiment: Polarised Vision 2020. VFX Supervision Megan Bagshaw.
RB: Pushing the boundaries of the medium is a natural part of the art making process because, in some ways, the artist is exploring the medium itself. What boundaries do you wish to push with the medium that you use?
MR & RM: We are interested in challenging assumptions about how we see and what we can know from looking at images. Given that 0rphan Drift works are primarily screen-based, we are particularly focused on bringing a certain kind of aliveness and the sensation of materiality to the screen. Even with our recent work that plays with the notion of AI, the audience is still primarily encountering the work through screens and we try not to forget that. The work creates a slippage between pictorial recognition, which can be consumable, and addressing the material or physical properties of something- its transmission- in a more abstract language. This language is meant to give different elements in the work agency.
IF AI/AIBOHPORTSUALC, 2020. (the word ‘claustrophobia’ backwards as if from the point of view of something inside the screen looking out). Single channel video. Running time 04.25
A central aspect of the work is the exploration of permeable thresholds between the concrete and the virtual; of invisible currents and currencies that become effective frequencies in our habitats and fantasies. We look at ways futurity is impacting on the present through conversations between human and machinic processes. Our ‘machine vision’ aesthetic has been part of this commitment for over 20 years. We have courted glitch, accident, iteration, excessive layering and deliberate misuse of first analogue, then digital, then coding technologies as forms of generative disturbance. From these experiments emerge cultivated presences that can become an agent in or character for a specific work. A form of collaboration with machines, where art practice makes space for the unknown and places imagination at its core, producing visions of possible embodiment, perception and proprioception as well as porous relations between the synthetic and organic.
We mix image registers in amalgamations on screen, using elements of painting, collage, digital animation, film, sound, objects in physical space, text and 3D animation. We intend to complicate and make porous the assumed boundaries between synthetic and traditional mediums. VFX innovations in animation softwares, together with visual coding, are key to manifesting our experimental, part synthetic nonhuman worlds. Digital animation, as Deborah Levitt says in Animatic Apparatus,” is a tool for developing perceptual and aesthetic languages that no longer privilege the human, and move away from the recognizable towards the unknown. It is expansive and questions subjectivity, gender, reality, materiality”. Animation can model new ways to negotiate the in-between of worlds, open up possible bodies, spaces, temporalities. It produces mythical dimensions, it is viscerally intimate and neuro speculative. What we don’t know is a generative space.
0rphan Drift 3D Animation Experiments 2020-22. Single channel HD video. Running time 05.11
Traditionally in the Western pictorial tradition, ‘landscapes’ are positioned as backdrops to human activity. Our work visually destabilizes this notion of human exceptionalism by dismantling the pictorial conventions that uphold it. Linearity, single point perspective and fixed figure ground relations are some of the things we dismantle in order to produce sensations of fluidity, uncertainty and multi-dimensional possibility, set against the human centrism that defines the Western Enlightenment world view.
RB: What future projects are you currently working on?
MR & RM: Nine Brains is the working title of our current project. As the next stage in cephalopod/AI work, the project is evolving to address the ocean environment more specifically and engaging in a kind of ecological interspecies world building. We are currently working on a script/score for what we envision to be a multi-channel installation work that involves both cinematic and XR components. We are simultaneously writing the score, building our production team and making proof of concept materials for fundraising. We are doing visual experiments to develop the language for this work. Aesthetically we are interested in bringing different tactile, visual, sonic and somatic elements together to lend more visceral dimensions to the language of immersive media. We are gathering a team of people from several arenas- some we have worked with before including VFX supervisor Megan Bagshaw and music producer Kode9. We are looking at developing components of the work using spatial audio engineering and de-centered dance choreography.
The script/score for Nine Brains is composed of a series of scenes involving an AI, an octopus, a kelp forest, a group of divers, the ocean floor and mineral extraction. Encounters between the AI and the octopus are like prompts to embody gaps between ML as it is developing and the sensory systems of this creature. We are aiming to create a self-reflexive work that can address the materiality of AI in terms of resource extraction, which we feel is a condition of AI development that often goes unmentioned. In this work we are also considering the importance of the Kelp forest as carbon sequestering eco-systems which are thriving in Capetown (where Maggie was located prior to this year) while struggling on the West Coast of the US (where Ranu is based). In this world, nonhuman entities are portrayed with agency as the protagonists. Real world contexts are brought into the realm of speculative fiction. As much as it is a critique, the work will provide an immersive encounter with otherness and potentiality.
9 Brains, Kelp Forest prototyping, 2023. Blender animation still. VFX Supervision Megan Bagshaw.
9 Brains, Coral Reef prototyping, 2023. Blender animation still. VFX Supervision Megan Bagshaw.
Thank you to the octopuses, (2019 -). 0rphan Drift
All images copyright and courtesy of 0phan Drift (Maggie Roberts & Ranu Mukherjee)
About 0rphan Drift
The collaborative artist as avatar 0rphan Drift (0D) has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision since its inception in 1994. It was co-founded by Maggie Roberts, Ranu Mukherjee, Suzi Karakashian and Erle Stenberg in London. It has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time. In recent years 0D has been considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness. The multiple channel video installation If AI Were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery San Francisco (2019), and the ACE funded IMT Gallery Becoming Octopus Meditations, both suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception, navigating what it means to communicate with an alien intelligence and how to address human exceptionalism’s limited understanding of ourselves in relation to other kinds of life, whether as the distributed intelligence of the octopus or the synthetic architecture of an Ai. 0rphan Drift has been partnered by the Serpentine Gallery’s Creative Ai Lab for several years, in a larger collaboration with Ai consultancy Etic Lab, ISCRI, and now the current 0rphan Drift 9 Brains project. 0rphan Drift installations, performances and speculative fictions have been exhibited nationally and internationally in gallery and museum spaces for over three decades. Recent exhibitions include Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, UK; Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum Lisbon; Speculative Frictions at PDX Contemporary Portland Or; Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery NY and in the book Fictioning, The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Edinburgh University Press, 2019. And In Conversation on Serpentine Twitch TV A Cephalopod>
https://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/0rphan-drift/
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